Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?

Published: November 18, 2001

Editors' Note Appended

(Page 6 of 7)

The trees on Lagi's plantation stayed healthy. The weeds were kept low. The cocoa pods grew, and when the pods were ripe, the boys chopped them down and Lagi's wives split them open and laid the seeds out to dry. Then the workers put them in sacks, and Lagi sold the sacks to people from the city. And then, like that, Youssouf had worked a year. His contract was over. Lagi asked if he'd like to stay for another year, and Youssouf said no. And so Lagi paid him the money. He paid him 75,000 Central African francs -- 7,500 a month for 10 months, with two months' work used to pay for his purchase price.

For a year of hard labor, six days a week, sunrise to sunset, Youssouf was paid a total of $102. It was more money than he had ever seen. He was proud of himself. He knew for certain that he was now an adult. Lagi's oldest son pedaled him out of the jungle, and Youssouf's time on the cocoa plantation came to an end.

He was dropped off in the same city where Lagi had purchased him. The city is called Daloa. Many people in Daloa, Youssouf discovered, speak his tribal language, Bambara, and almost everyone who spoke Bambara told him the same thing -- they told him to go to the Malian Association. They said that the association would give him a free place to sleep. And so Youssouf made his way to the cinder-block building on a quiet side street in central Daloa, and said to the person who opened the door that he had just finished working on a cocoa plantation.

The person at the door was named Diarra Drissa. He was a vice president of the Malian Association. He told Youssouf that the association was there to help boys who had escaped or had been released from the cocoa plantations. Inside the association's building, sitting on a soft couch, Diarra had a long talk with Youssouf. He asked Youssouf if he knew what chocolate was. Youssouf said that he did not. Diarra explained that cocoa beans were the main ingredient in a food called chocolate, a food that was eaten mostly in other countries, far away. He said that to keep the price of chocolate low, some very bad things were happening. He told Youssouf that it might seem as if he had been paid a lot of money, but he really hadn't been. He said that nobody in the Ivory Coast would work for such a low wage. Youssouf said he didn't know that, and Diarra said that's exactly why the plantation owner had bought him.

Diarra said that the work Youssouf was made to do was wrong. A teenage boy should not be made to work so hard, under such conditions, trapped in a place he could not leave. He said that Youssouf was fortunate -- other boys worked for years and were never paid. Some were beaten. Others ran away. When Diarra said this, Youssouf asked if a boy named Abdoul Touré had visited, almost a year ago. Diarra said yes. Abdoul, Youssouf learned, had spent two nights in the forest before he eventually found his way to the Malian Association and later returned home to Mali.

Diarra said that he wanted men like the one who took Youssouf across the border to be stopped, and he wanted the farmers who bought the boys to be punished. He said that many people agreed with him -- including people from countries where there was a lot of chocolate. He said that many people from other countries agreed that boys like Youssouf were working as slaves, and that some human rights groups were encouraging a boycott of Ivory Coast cocoa. In the United States, Diarra had just learned, some of the companies who sell chocolate might soon start monitoring the working conditions on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast. These companies would buy cocoa from only those farms that did not hire under-age workers. They would then label their chocolate bars with the words: ''No child slave labor.''

Diarra told Youssouf that he shouldn't feel bad; he said that every year thousands and thousands of boys came from Mali to work in the cocoa fields. But it was too late. Youssouf felt bad. He felt as if somebody had played a trick on him. He felt that maybe his father had been right all along. Maybe the Ivory Coast was a bad place. Maybe, Youssouf thought, maybe he really wasn't an adult after all.

The Malian Association paid for a bus to return Youssouf to Mali. The bus took Youssouf over the border and into the city of Sikasso, where Youssouf had first met Dosso, the man who had taken him to the Ivory Coast. In Sikasso, there is another group that helps Malian children who have gone to work in the Ivory Coast. It is a branch of the international organization Save the Children. The Save the Children office consists of five or six rooms on the second floor of a whitewashed stucco building. It's one of the city's nicest and cleanest buildings -- nicer and cleaner than even the Sikasso hospital. Sometimes 20 or more children are housed there. They sleep on the floor, often bent about one another in the same positions they'd slept in while on the cocoa plantations.

Youssouf lived in the office for five days. Each day, he met with a young Malian psychologist named Ibrahim Haidara. Ibrahim told Youssouf that leaving his country had been a bad idea. He told him it was dangerous. He explained that it was best for Youssouf to remain always in a familiar place, surrounded by people he knew. He said it was never a good idea to abandon your family. He told Youssouf that if everybody left Mali, there would be no one left in their country. Then he taught Youssouf some patriotic songs, including the Malian national anthem. Finally, Ibrahim showed him a video.

Michael Finkel is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about the international trade in human organs.

Editors' Note: February 21, 2002, Thursday An article in The Times Magazine on Nov. 18, headlined ''Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?'' described the experience of an adolescent West African boy in Mali who left his home village and sold himself into service on a cocoa plantation in Ivory Coast. The article described his year hacking weeds in the fields, earning a total of $102, and his decision against staying a second year. It reported on two organizations that helped him return home, and it asked whether they were exaggerating the plight of youths like Youssouf. One agency mentioned was a branch of the human rights organization Save the Children Canada, in the Malian city of Sikasso. The article was illustrated with photographs, including one taken by the writer, an uncaptioned full-page image of a youth. On Feb. 13, the writer, Michael Finkel, informed The Times that an official of Save the Children had contacted him to say that in investigating the case, the agency had located the boy in the picture, and that he was not Youssouf Malé. The editors then questioned the writer and began to make their own inquiries to verify the article's account. The writer, a freelancer, then acknowledged that the boy in the article was a composite, a blend of several boys he interviewed, including one named Youssouf Malé and another, the boy in the picture, identified by Save the Children as Madou Traoré. Though the account was drawn from his reporting on the scene and from interviews with human rights workers, Mr. Finkel acknowledges, many facts were extrapolated from what he learned was typical of boys on such journeys, and did not apply specifically to any single individual. The writer says that he wrote this article without consulting his notes. (The article included no direct quotations.) The notes, which the editors have now read, reveal that contrary to the description of Youssouf Malé's year of work at the plantation, he spent less than a month there before running away. Much of the account of Youssouf's year was in reality collected from various sources who had been on the plantation or others like it, Mr. Finkel says. The description at the end of the article about the boy's return to his parents, who had feared that he was dead, was told to the writer by Madou Traoré as his own experience, not Youssouf's, Mr. Finkel's notes show. The scene at the Save the Children office in Sikasso was approximated, based on information told to the writer by the psychologist working there at the time about how such interviews often took place. Save the Children says that this psychologist never conducted such an interview with Youssouf. In addition, the psychologist recently told The Times that he did not show children a video from Anti-Slavery International, an incident the article described. Articles in The Times Magazine are examined by fact checkers. When principal sources cannot be reached by telephone or e-mail, as was the case here, the magazine relies heavily on the author's account. The checker questioned the author's French-language translator, who confirmed some facts in the article but left other questions un answered. The checker also approached the psychologist, who replied by e-mail that he was no longer working at Save the Children and could not answer her questions. The telephone number for the Malian Association, a welfare group mentioned in the article, was not working at the time. The author, Mr. Finkel, has written eight other articles for The Times Magazine, including last Sunday's cover article, ''To Wait or to Flee,'' about a thousand-year-old community stranded by war and starvation in Afghanistan. That article went to press before The Times was aware of the improper narrative techniques in the earlier one. Mr. Finkel has assured the editors that none of his other writing was falsified or fictionalized, and The Times knows of no evidence to the contrary. The Times's policies prohibit falsifying a news account or using fictional devices in factual material. Mr. Finkel has been under contract to the magazine as a contributing writer, but the editors have informed him that he will not receive further assignments. Editors' Note: April 14, 2002, Sunday An editors' note on Feb. 21 reported The Times Magazine's discovery that a Nov. 18 article by Michael Finkel, ''Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?'' had been built around a composite character, with time sequences and certain other facts falsified. Since the discovery, the editors have undertaken to verify the accuracy and integrity of the six other articles written by Finkel for the magazine over the last two years. The Times's investigation, which included rereporting by telephone as well as site visits in several cases, is complete and has found only the following two factual errors: In ''Naji's Taliban Phase'' (Dec. 16, 2001), about two Afghan men who communicated across partisan lines, the number of letters exchanged between the two men was reported incorrectly. The article said there were 20. The two men say the number was 7. In ''Playing War'' (Dec. 24, 2000), an article about Palestinian youths, a town referred to as Hamman should have been rendered Hamama. In addition, the magazine learned that the boat carrying Haitian refugees described in ''Desperate Passage'' (June 18, 2000) did not sink of its own accord, as it appeared to be doing at the time the author and refugees were rescued by the Coast Guard. As the Coast Guard recently explained, it accelerated the sinking of the boat ''to protect shipping lanes.''